Until it was taken off the air last December, one of the most popular television programs in China’s Henan province, which has a population of 100 million, was “Interviews Before Execution.” The presenter was Ding Yu, a pretty young woman, always carefully dressed with colorful scarves and blouses; in each episode, she would interview on camera a condemned murderer who was about to face a firing squad or a lethal injection.

While Beijing has long been known for its use of capital punishment, the practice has usually been kept out of official media apart from exceptional cases [....]

With Ding Yu’s five years of interviews, however, capital punishment was brought directly into Chinese homes—and with government endorsement. As the BBC explained in its airing of a recent Chinese-made talk show about the program that will soon air on PBS, the channel on which it appeared is supervised by the state; the State Propaganda Department and the judges who handed down the sentences also had to approve each program. The interviews were launched in 2006, and there were over 200 in the program’s five-year run [....]

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I have no idea or particular opinion about whether Garrison Keillor is guilty of anything, though it's always struck me as odd. But this somewhat but not quite illuminating article gums up the works a bit when taken as a part of a whole. The whole, of course, being accusations flying hither and yon with little if any explanation - even when they could stand some.

(THREAD) Yulya Alferova—ex-wife of Russian oligarch Artem Klyushin and a member of Trump's entourage in Moscow in 2013—is yet another witness who confirms, albeit inadvertently, Trump lied about what happened at the Ritz Moscow. The list of such witnesses is now very, very long. pic.twitter.com/BViILTZP67

On the hamster wheel of continual work, production and consumption, and Hebert Marcuse's.dreams.

[....] Marcuse did not live to see the 1980s, however [....] But his ideas lived on. In a 2004 essay for Harper’s magazine, for example, novelist and essayist Mark Slouka took to task the U.S. obsession with work [....]

One woman’s account of clandestine meetings, financial transactions, and legal pacts designed to hide an extramarital affair.....American Media, Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer, had paid a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for exclusive rights to McDougal’s story ...David Pecker, AMI CEO, describes the President as “a personal friend... he never printed a word about Trump without his approval.”

Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

Was Trump diminishing the significance of the word treason, projecting onto the opposition (as he so often does) his own transgressions, by accusing Democrats of treason for not applauding him at the SOU?

Talking heads don't appear to have had much time to look at the details yet. Reporters are waiting on the formal announcement from Rod Rosenstein of the indictments. It is clear that they are directly related to Putin, not clear yet whether to the Trump administration.

A federal grand jury in the District of Columbia returned an indictment Friday against 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities accused of violating US laws to interfere with US elections and political processes [....]

[....] in a blow to President Donald Trump, the GOP plan to enshrine his four-part immigration framework came the furthest of any proposal from reaching the 60-vote margin needed for passage, failing by 39-60. A competing bipartisan agreement got rejected, 54-45, after a furious White House campaign to defeat it, including a Thursday veto threat.

WASHINGTON — Steve Bannon, who served as President Donald Trump’s chief strategist, was interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller over multiple days this week, NBC News has learned from two sources familiar with the proceedings.

When a transgender woman told doctors at a hospital in New York that she wanted to breast-feed her pregnant partner’s baby, they put her on a regimen of drugs that included an anti-nausea medication licensed in Britain and Canada but banned in the United States.

Within a month, according to the journal Transgender Health, the woman, 30, who was born male, was producing droplets of milk. Within three months — two weeks before the baby’s due date — she had increased her production to eight ounces of milk a day [....]

President Trump endorsed a 25-cent gas tax hike to pay for infrastructure at a White House meeting this morning with senior administration officials and members of Congress from both parties, according to two sources with direct knowledge. Trump also said he was open to other ways to pay for infrastructure, according to a source with direct knowledge.